Ford Madox Ford's Modernism and the Question of Tradition

Ford Madox Ford's Modernism and the Question of Tradition Andrzej Gasiorek Birmingham University AN OFT-ARTICULATED critical view urges that modernism be defined in terms of a break with tradition.1 Astradur Eysteinsson sums up this view in his claim that the term denotes "a major revolt... against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world," concluding that "the self-conscious break with tradition must... be seen as the hallmark of modernism."2 The view is contested but remains something of a commonplace. The idea that modernism should be defined in terms of a rupture with the past is in turn often associated with a further claim—that it is hostile to its own present. An influential argument has it that modernism is elitist, arcane, authoritarian, and, in some of its manifestations, fascistic. John Carey notoriously asserts that its "purpose" was to "exclude" a newly educated mass readership by cultivating obscurity; the "principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their humanity ."3 Conceived in such terms, modernism comes to be a literarycultural aesthetic that is predicated on a rhetoric of oppositionality—its rejection of outmoded precursors and its search for new forms is inseparable from its enmity to the society of its day, more specifically, to démocratisation and the "hideous progeny" to which it gives birth. Such accounts tend to be informed by insufficiently differentiated usages of their own organising terms: "modernism," "tradition," "the reading public ." It should surely be clear by now that modernism is a portmanteau concept, which comprises a variety of often mutually incompatible trajectories . The devil is in the detail. General claims about modernism's rupture with "tradition" (which tradition?) or its contempt for the "masses" (which masses?) are either misleading or inaccurate. The di- ELT 44 : 1 2001 verse writers whom we belatedly consider to be modernists reacted to the present and negotiated with the past in markedly different ways. Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer) is an interesting case with regard to these debates. Ford's role as an integral figure in the emergence of modernism has until recently been underplayed. In the last decade or so, this neglect has been rectified, and his influence as poet, novelist, and proselytising critic has increasingly been recognised.4 Eric Hornberger argues that Ford's English Review editorials "brilliantly define the doctrines upon which a modernism could be erected," and Max Saunders, invoking a "Ford Era," describes Ford as "a transitional figure—a central transforming force of early English modernism."5 Saunders's view is surely right; Ford's work with Conrad, his defence of literary impressionism, his tenure as editor of the English Review and the Transatlantic Review, his influence on Pound, and his two major novels—The Good Soldier and Parade's End—place him as a writer who contributed to modernism's development in important ways. Hence Pound's claim: "The revolution of the word began so far as it affected the men who were of my age in London in 1908, with the LONE whimper of Ford Madox Hueffer."6 In this essay I want to focus on Ford's understanding of modernity and on the implications of this understanding for his modernist aesthetic . Having outlined Ford's critical position, I will briefly discuss The Good Soldier, analysing its modernism in relation to its foregrounding of textuality and the discursive constitution of the self, before returning to the question of modernist attitudes to tradition and the reading public. I shall argue that Ford does not urge a break with the literary traditions of the past as, say, the Italian Futurists were to do, but that he discriminates between traditions in order to situate his writing and that of authors he admires within a precisely defined literary current. Claims about modernism's rejection of the past are problematic because modernism consists of diverse practices and because traditions are variegated . The view that modernism is anti-traditional is theoretically flawed, since it relies on a monolithic conception of tradition, and empirically false, since it ignores the continuities between tradition and innovation fostered...